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CHARLES F. D. BELDEN 

Sfitate S£iiitarian 



ADDRESS 



Delivered before a Joint Convention of the Senate and House 

of Representatives of the 

GENERAL COURT OF MASSACHUSETTS, 

on Friday, February 12, 1909, 



Hon. Henry Cabot Lodge, 



ON THE 



Occasion of the One-hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of 

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 




BOSTON, MASS. 
1909. 



. 8 

. L8I 



Boston : 
Wright & Potter Printing Co., 18 Post Office Square. 



IN EJCCH/W6E 

FEB 3 1914 



ADDRESS. 



Mr. President, Mr. Speaker, Your Excellency, Sen- 
ators and Gentlemen of the House of Representa- 
tives: — By your kind request I am here. An invitation 
from you is to me a command which it is at once an 
honor and a pleasure to obey. But in thus honoring me 
you have suddenly imposed upon me a duty which it is 
not easy worthily to fulfill. You have asked me to address 
you upon this, the one hundredth anniversary of the birth 
of Abraham Lincoln; to express for you and to you some 
of the thoughts which ought to find utterance when, on 
the completion of the century, we seek to pay fit homage 
to the memory of that great man. 

I know not how it may be with the many others who, in 
these days of commemoration, will speak of Lincoln, but to 
me the dominant feeling, as I approach my subject, is a 
sense of helplessness, and a sharp realization of the im- 
possibility of doing justice to such an occasion. To attempt 
here a review of his life would be labor lost. Ten stately 
volumes by those who lived in closest communion with 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



him, and who knew him best, were not more than ade- 
quate to tell fitly the story of his life. That story too, 
in varying form, is known to all the people, "familiar in 
their mouths as household words." From the early days 
of dire poverty, from the log cabin of the shiftless pioneer, 
ever moving forward in search of a fortune which never 
came, from the picture of the boy working his sums or 
reading his Bible and his Milton by the red light of the 
fire, the marvelous tale goes onward and upward to the 
solemn scene of the second inaugural, and to the burial of 
the great chief amid the lamentations of a nation. We 
know it all, and the story is one of the great treasures of 
the American people. 

Still more impossible would it be in a brief moment here 
to draw, even in the barest outline, a sketch of the events 
in which his was the commanding presence, for that would be 
to write the history of the United States during the most 
crowded and most terrible years of our existence as a 
nation. Yet if Lincoln's life and deeds, by their very mag- 
nitude, thus exclude us from any attempt even to enumer- 
ate them, there is, nevertheless, something still better which 
we can do upon this day, forever made memorable by his 
birth. We can render to him what I venture to think is 
the truest homage, that which I believe he would prize 
most, and compared to which any other is little more than 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 5 



lip service. We can pause to-day in the hurry of daily life 
and contemplate that great, lonely, tragic figure, that im- 
agination with its touch of the poet, that keen, strong 
mind with its humor and its pathos, that splendid common 
sense and pure character, and then learn from the life 
which the possessor of all these qualities lived, and from 
the deeds which he did, lessons which may not be without 
value to each one of us in our own lives, in teaching us 
the service which we should render to our country. Let me 
express my meaning, with slight variation, in his own im- 
mortal words : — 

The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can 
never forget what he did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated 
here to the unfinished work which he who fought here has thus far so nobly 
advanced. 

In this spirit I am about to suggest a few thoughts 
among the many which have come to me as I have medi- 
tated upon the life of Abraham Lincoln, and upon what, 
with that great theme before me, I should say to you to-day. 

I desire first, if I can, to take you back for a moment to 
the living man, and thereby show you what some of his 
trials were and how he met them, for in doing so I believe 
we can learn better how to deal with our own problems. 
I think, too, that if we thus look upon him with consid- 
erate eyes, we shall be inspired to seek, in public affairs, 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



for more charitable and better instructed judgments upon 
public men and public events than are common now. We 
are apt, unconsciously and almost inevitably, to confuse in 
our minds the Lincoln of to-day, the Lincoln of history, 
as he dwells in our hearts and our imaginations, with the 
actual man who was President of the United States in the 
dark days of the civil war, and who struggled forward amid 
difficulties greater, almost, than any ever encountered by a 
leader of men. 

Mankind has never lost its capacity for weaving myths 
or its inborn love for them. This faculty, or rather this 
innate need of human nature, is apparent in the earliest 
pages of human history. The beautiful and tragic myths, 
born of the Greek imagination, which have inspired poets 
and dramatists for three thousand years, come to us out of 
the dim past with the light of a roseate dawn upon them. 
They come to us alike in the great verse of Homer and 
veiled in the gray mists of the north, where we descry the 
shadows of fighting men and hear the clash of swords and 
the wild screams of the Valkyries. The leaders of tribes, 
the founders of States, the eponymous and autochthonous 
heroes in the infancy of civilization were all endowed by 
the popular imagination with a divine descent and a near 
kinship to the gods. We do not give our heroes godlike 
ancestors, although I have seen a book which traces the 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



pedigree of Washington to Odin, but when they are great 
enough we transmute the story of their lives into a myth, 
just like the Greeks and the Norsemen. Do not imagine 
from this that I am about to tell you of the "real" or the 
"true" Lincoln. Nothing would be more alien to my pur- 
pose, or more distasteful, for I have observed that, as a 
rule, when these words are prefixed to the subject of a bi- 
ography it usually means that we have spread before us a 
collection of petty details and unworthy gossip which pre- 
sents an utterly distorted view of a great man, which is, in 
substance, entirely false, and which gratifies only those 
envious minds which like to see superiority brought down 
to their own level. Such presentations are as ignoble and 
base as the popular myth, however erroneous, is loving and 
beautiful, — a manifestation of that noble quality in human 
nature which Carlyle has described in his "Hero Worship." 
I wish merely to detach Lincoln from the myth, which has 
possession of us all, that his wisdom, his purity and his 
greatness were as obvious and acknowledged, or ought to 
have been as obvious and acknowledged, in his lifetime as 
they are to-day. We have this same feeling about the one 
man in American history who stands beside Lincoln in un- 
challenged equality of greatness. Washington, indeed, is so 
far removed that we have lost our conception of the fact 
that he was bitterly criticized, that he struggled with many 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



difficulties, and that his words, which to us have an al- 
most sacred significance, were, when they were uttered, 
treated by some persons then extant with contempt. Let 
me give you an idea of what certain people, now quite for- 
gotten, thought of Washington when he went out of office. 
On the 6th of March, 1797, the leading newspaper of the 
opposition spoke as follows: — 

" Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace" was the pious ejacu- 
lation of a pious man who beheld a flood of happiness rushing in upon man- 
kind. If ever there was a time that would license the reiteration of the ejacu- 
lation, that time has now arrived, for the man who is the source of all the 
misfortunes of our country is this day reduced to a level with his fellow-citizens, 
and is no longer possessed of power to multiply evils upon the United States.^ 
If ever there was a period for rejoicing, this is the moment. Every heart in 
unison with the freedom and happiness of the people ought to beat high with 
exultation that the name of Washington ceases from this day to give currency 
to political insults and to legalized corruption. A new era is now opening 
upon us, — an era which promises much to the people, for public measures 
must now stand upon their own merits, and nefarious projects can no longer 
be supported by a name. When a retrospect has been taken of the Wash- 
ington administration for eight years it is a subject of the greatest astonish- 
ment that a single individual should have cankered the principles of Repub- 
licanism in an enlightened people just emerging from the gulf of despotism, 
and should have carried his designs against the public liberty so far as to have 
put in jeopardy its very existence. Such, however, are the facts, and with 
these staring us in the face, the day ought to be a jubilee in the United States. 

How strange and unreal this sounds to us who know not 
merely that George Washington led the army of the 
United States to victory, but that his administration es- 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



tablished our Union and our government, which Lincoln, 
leading the American people, was destined to preserve. The 
myth has grown so powerful that it is hard to compre- 
hend that actual living men were uttering words like these 
about George Washington. 

The same feeling in regard to Lincoln began to take 
form even earlier than in the case of Washington. The 
manner of his death made men see, as by a flash of light- 
ning, what he was and what he had done, even before the 
grave closed over him. Nothing illustrates the violent re- 
vulsion of sentiment which then occurred better than the 
verses which appeared in "Punch" when the news of his 
death reached England. He had been jeered at, abused, 
vilified and caricatured in England to a degree which can 
be understood only by those who lived through that time, 
or who have turned over the newspapers and magazines, or 
read the memoirs and diaries of that epoch. In this chorus 
of abuse "Punch" had not lagged behind. Then came the 
assassination, and then these verses by Tom Taylor, written 
to accompany Tenniel's cartoon representing England lay- 
ing a wreath on Lincoln's bier: — 

Beside this corpse, that bears for winding sheet 
The Stars and Stripes he lived to rear anew, 

Between the mourners at his head and feet. 
Say, scurril jester, is there room for you ? 



10 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer, 

To lame my pencil and confute my pen; 
To make me own this hind of princes peer, 

This rail-splitter a true born king of men. 

How, at a glance, we see not only the greatness and no- 
bility of the man, forcing themselves upon the minds of 
men abroad as at home, but how keenly these remorseful 
verses make us realize the storm of abuse, of criticism and 
defamation through which he had passed to victory. 

From that day to this the tide of feeling has swept on, 
until, with Lincoln as with Washington, we have become 
unable, without a serious effort, to realize the attacks 
which he met, the assaults which were made upon him or 
the sore trials which he had to endure. I would fain show 
you how the actual man, living in those terrible years, met 
one or two of the attacks. 

Lincoln believed that the first step toward the salvation 
of the Union was to limit the area of secession. He 
wished above all things, therefore, to hold in the Union the 
border States, as they were then called. If those States 
were added to the Confederacy the chances of saving the 
Union would have been seriously diminished. In those same 
States there was a strong Union feeling and a very weak 
antislavery feeling. If they could be convinced that the 
controlling purpose of the war was to preserve the Union 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. n 



the chances were that they could be held, but if they were 
made to believe that the real object of the war was the 
abolition of slavery they would probably have been lost. 
Lincoln, therefore, had checked Fremont in issuing orders 
for the liberation of the slaves, and in the first year of the 
war had done nothing in that direction, for reasons which 
seemed to him good, and which, to all men to-day, appear 
profoundly wise. Abolitionists and extreme antislavery men 
everywhere were bitterly disappointed, and a flood of criti- 
cism was let loose upon him for his attitude in this matter, 
while at the same time he was also abused by reactionaries 
and by the opposition as a " radical " and " black republican." 
Horace Greeley, an able editor and an honest man, devoted 
to the cause of the Union, but a lifelong and ardent oppo- 
nent of slavery, assailed the President in the New York 
"Tribune." Here is Lincoln's reply: — 

Executive Mansion, 
Washington, Aug. 22, 1862. 

As to the policy I " seem to be pursuing," as you say, I have not meant to 
leave any one in doubt. 

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Con- 
stitution The sooner the national authority can be restored, the nearer the 
Union will be " the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save 
the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree 
with them If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could 
at the same time destroy slavery, 1 do not agree with them. My paramount 
object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to de- 



12 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



stroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would 
do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I 
could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. 
What I do about slavery and the colored race I do because I believe it helps 
to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it 
would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe that 
what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I believe doing 
more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors, 
and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views. 

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and 
I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every- 
where could be free. 

What a reply that is! Using his unrivalled power of 
statement he sets forth his policy with a force which drives 
opposition helpless before it and renders retort impossible. 
He strips the issue bare of every irrelevant consideration 
and makes it so plain that no one can mistake it. 

This was a case of specific criticism. There were others of 
a more general nature. A few months after Greeley wrote, 
Mr. Lincoln received a letter from Mr. Carl Schurz. Mr. 
Schurz, who has been a familiar figure to the present gen- 
eration, was an able man and a very eloquent and effective 
speaker, especially upon economic subjects. He was also 
fond of criticising other people who were doing work for 
which they were responsible and not he. His system of 
criticism was a simple one. He would depict an ideal Pres- 
ident, or Cabinet officer, or Senator; put him in an ideal 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. «3 



situation, surrounded by conditions as they ought to be, 
and with this imaginary person he would then contrast, 
most unfavorably, the actual man who was trying to get 
results out of conditions which were not at all as they 
ought to be, but which, as a matter of fact, actually ex- 
isted. This method of discussion, of course, presented Mr. 
Schurz in a very admirable light, and gave him a great 
reputation, especially with people who had never been 
called upon to bear any public responsibility at all. When 
Mr. Schurz was in the Cabinet himself he fell easily into 
the class which he criticized, and, naturally, bore no rela- 
tion to the ideal by which he tried other people, but that 
fact never altered the opinion of his greatness entertained 
by his admirers. They liked to hear him find fault point- 
edly and eloquently with their contemporaries, but they 
forgot or overlooked the fact that in the past he had ap- 
plied his system to Lincoln, and in that connection the 
process seems less convincing. Here is Lincoln's reply to 
Mr. Schurz's criticism: — 

Washington, Nov. 24, 1862. 

My Dear Sir: — I have just received and read your letter of the 20th. 
The purport of it is that we lost the late elections and the administration is 
failing because the war is unsuccessful, and that I must not flatter myself 
that I am not justly to blame for it. I certainly know that, if the war fails, 
the administration fails, and that 1 will be blamed for it, whether 1 deserve 
it or not. And I ought to be blamed, if 1 could do better. You think 1 could 



1 4 AB RAH AM LINCOLN. 



do better; therefore you blame me already. I think 1 could not do better; 
therefore I blame you for blaming me. I understand you now to be willing 
to accept the help of men who are not Republicans, provided they have 
" heart in it." Agreed. I want no others. But who is to be the judge of 
hearts, or of "heart in it?" If I must discard my own judgment and take 
yours, I must also take that of others; and by the time I should reject all I 
should be advised to reject, I should have none left, Republicans or others, — 
not even yourself. For be assured, my dear sir, there are men who have " heart 
in it" that think you are performing your part as poorly as you think I am 
performing mine. 

In these two letters which I have quoted lie great les- 
sons. There is not a man to-day, whose judgment would 
be of any value, who does not know that Lincoln, in these 
instances, was absolutely right, and his critics hopelessly 
and ignorantly wrong. They teach us that a great execu- 
tive officer, dealing with the most momentous problems, 
cannot do everything at once; that he must subordinate 
the lesser to the greater if he would not fail entirely; that 
he must do the best he can, and not lose all by striving 
vainly for the ideally best. He must steer, also, between 
the radical extremists on the one side and the reactionary 
extremists on the other, — no easy task, and one which 
Lincoln performed with a perfection rarely seen among 
men. Lincoln could have said, with absolute truth, as 
Seneca's Pilot says, in Montaigne's paraphrase: — 

Oh, Neptune, thou mayest save me if thou wilt; thou mayest sink me if 
thou wilt; but whatever may befall 1 shall hold my tiller true. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. I 5 



As we look at this correspondence and see how Lincoln 
was criticized by able men on a point where the judgment 
of events and of history alike has gone wholly in his favor, 
is it not well for us, before passing hasty judgment and in- 
dulging in quick condemnation, to reflect that the men 
charged with great public duties may have a knowledge of 
conditions and possess sources of information which are not 
known to the world, or even to those who criticize? Both 
for men in public life, and for those who criticize these 
men, I think this correspondence contains many lessons in 
conduct and character which, if taken to heart, will make 
the public service better and the judgment of the onlooker 
less hasty. 

This thought and the admonition which these glimpses of 
the past bring to us have been put into noble verse by a 
poet of our own day, and it is to the poet that we must 
always turn for the best expression of what we try to say 
with the faltering words of prose. 

A flying word from here and there, 

Had sown the name at which we sneered, 
But soon the name was everywhere, 

To be reviled and then revered: 
A presence to be loved and feared, 

We cannot hide it or deny 
That we, the gentlemen who jeered, 

May be forgotten by and by. 



1 6 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



Consider, also, the result. Lincoln's paramount purpose 
was to save the Union, and he saved it. His critics 
thought he was sacrificing the antislavery cause. He thought 
otherwise, and he was right. At the accepted time he 
emancipated the slaves and signed the death warrant of 
human slavery. Had he struck at the wrong moment he 
might have ruined the Union cause and thereby left the 
slaves in bondage. He was a great statesman, and he 
knew all the conditions, not merely a part of them. He 
therefore succeeded where his critics would have failed. 

Turn now from the difficulties and the criticisms with 
which Lincoln contended upon his own side, and which sur- 
rounded him like a network, through which he had to cut 
or break his way as best he might, and look with me for 
a moment at the force with which he was doing battle, 
and see whether we can also find a lesson there. Lincoln's 
purpose was to save the Union; the object of those with 
whom he fought was to destroy it. I am not going to 
waste time upon that emptiest of all questions, whether 
the States had the right, under the Constitution, to secede. 
The purpose of the Constitution, if it had meaning or pur- 
pose, was to make a nation out of jarring States, and that 
it had succeeded in doing so was stated by Webster, once 
and for all, when he replied to Hayne in the greatest 
speech ever made in the Senate. Secession was the de- 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 1 7 



struction of the Union, whether the Constitution provided 
for such a contradiction as the right of secession or not. 
Secession was revolution, and revolution is not to be stopped 
or to be provided for by paper constitutions. This par- 
ticular revolution, however, found its reason and its excuse 
in the doctrine of State rights. Under cover of maintain- 
ing the rights of States the Union was to be destroyed. On 
this issue the war was fought out. The Union was victo- 
rious, and the rights of States emerged from the conflict 
beaten and discredited. The result brought with it a new 
danger in the direction of a disproportionate growth in the 
power of the central government, and this peril the fa- 
natics of State rights, and no one else, had brought upon 
themselves and upon the country. In the first public 
speech which I ever delivered, some thirty years ago, alas, 
I said: — 

. . . The principle of State rights is as vital and essential as the national 
principle itself. If the former, carried to extremes, means anarchy, the latter, 
carried to like extremes, means centralization and despotism. . . . 

Two lessons are clearly written on the pages which record the strife between 
the inborn love of local independence and the broader spirit of nationality 
created by the Constitution. One is reverence for the Constitution; the other, 
a careful maintenance of the principle of State rights. 

To these general views I have always adhered, and I re- 
peat them now because I do not wish to be misunderstood 
in what I am about to say in regard to State rights at the 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



present time. The subject is one of deep importance and 
ought never to be neglected. The growth in power of the 
central government is inevitable, because it goes hand in 
hand with the growth of the country. There is no danger 
that this movement will be too slow; there is danger that 
it will be too rapid and too extensive. The strength of 
our American system resides in the fact that we have a 
Union of States, that we are neither a weak and chaotic 
confederation, nor one highly centralized government. It is 
of the highest importance that the States should be main- 
tained in all their proper rights and the Constitution scru- 
pulously observed, but when the Constitution is thrust for- 
ward every day, on every occasion, serious and trivial 
alike, whether applicable or inapplicable, and for mere pur- 
poses of obstruction, the government of the Union is not 
injured, but the Constitution is brought into contempt, and 
the profound respect which we all should feel for that 
great instrument is impaired. In the same way the rights 
of the States, the true rights, are again in danger at this 
time, not from those who would trench upon them, but 
from those who abuse them, as did the advocates of seces- 
sion. Nothing can accelerate the growth of the national 
power to an unwholesome degree so much as the failure of 
the States, from local or selfish motives, to do their part in 
the promotion of measures which the good of the whole 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 19 



people, without respect to State lines, demands. No such 
reproach, so far as I am aware, lies at the door of Massa- 
chusetts. The President of the United States has said, not 
once but many times, that if every State had adopted cor- 
poration and railroad laws like those of Massachusetts 
there would have been no need of much of that nationa 
railroad legislation which he has advised and which has 
been largely enacted. He has also said, in regard to our 
laws relating to health, that if every State had the same 
system there would have been but little need of the pure 
food act. There are other States which have a record like 
that of Massachusetts in these directions, but there are 
many which have not. The result of this neglect, and of 
local selfishness, has been national legislation and a great 
extension of the national power, brought on directly either 
by the failure of the States to act, or by thrusting State 
interests and State rights across the path of progress. 

Take another and far more serious phase of this same 
question. We can deal with foreign nations only through 
the United States. By the Constitution a treaty is the 
supreme law of the land. No State can make a treaty, 
and yet a treaty is worthless if any State in the Union 
can disregard it at pleasure. The people of the United 
States will not long suffer their foreign relations to be im- 
periled, or permit the peace of the country to be put in 



20 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

jeopardy, because some one State does not choose to sub- 
mit to the action of the general government in a matter 
with which the general government alone can deal. They 
will not permit a Legislature or a city council to disregard 
treaties and endanger our relations with other countries. 
Those who force State rights into our foreign relations will 
eventually bring on a situation from which those rights will 
emerge as broken and discredited as they did from the 
civil war. They were the enemy, powerful in their in- 
fluence upon the minds of men, with which Lincoln grap- 
pled, and which he finally overthrew. The danger to the 
rights of States does not arise now, any more than it 
did in 1861, from the incursions of the national government 
but from the follies of those who try to use them as a 
cover for resistance to the general government in the 
execution of the duties committed to it. Congress alone 
can declare war. The President and the Senate alone can 
make peace. It is not to be tolerated that one or two 
States shall assert the power to force the country into war 
to gratify their own prejudices. Their rights will be pro- 
tected by the general government sedulously and fearlessly, 
but if they venture to usurp or to deride the national au- 
thority they will be forced to yield to the power of the 
Union, and the State rights which they have wrongly in- 
voked, and their indifference to the interests of the nation, 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 21 

will meet the punishment they deserve. The day has 
passed when one State, or a few States, could interfere 
with the government of the Union in its own field. Lin- 
coln smote down that baleful theory when he crushed se- 
cession and saved the Union. But if we are wise it is to 
the States themselves that we ought to look for the preser- 
vation of the rights of the States, which are so essential to 
our system of government, and the States can preserve 
their rights only by doing their duty individually in regard 
to measures with which the welfare of the people of all the 
States is bound up, and by not seeking to thwart the gen- 
eral government in the performance of the high functions 
entrusted to it by the Constitution. If the advocates of 
the extreme doctrines of State rights use them not for 
the protection of local self-government, but to promote 
selfish interests hostile to the general welfare, or still more 
to embarrass and paralyze the national government in 
the performance of the duties for which it was created, 
the people will not endure it, and State rights will be 
unduly weakened if not swept away, — a result greatly 
to be deplored. 

In the civil war the fighting champions of State rights 
bound them up with the cause of slavery, which was not 
only an evil and a wrong, but which was a gross anachro- 
nism, — a stumbling block in the onward march of the Re- 



22 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



public. They and their allies, the copperheads, the south- 
ern sympathizers and the timid commercialism of the 
north, proclaimed that they were conservatives, and de- 
nounced Lincoln as a revolutionist. "Radical," "black 
republican," "tyrant" were among the mildest of the 
epithets they heaped upon him. Yet the reality was the 
exact reverse of this. Lincoln was the true conservative, 
and he gave his life to preserve and construct, not to 
change and destroy. 

The men who sought to rend the Union asunder in order 
to shelter slavery beneath State rights, the reactionaries 
who set themselves against the march of human liberty, 
were the real revolutionists. Lincoln's policy was to secure 
progress and right by the limitation and extinction of slav- 
ery, but his mission was to preserve and maintain the 
Union. He sought to save and to create, not to destroy, 
and yet he wrought at the same time the greatest reform 
ever accomplished in the history of the nation. Let us 
learn from him that reaction is not conservatism, and that 
violent change and the abandonment of the traditions and 
the principles which have made us great is not progress, 
but revolution and confusion. 

One word upon one other text and I have done. In 
August, 1864, Lincoln one morning asked his Cabinet to 
sign their names on the back of a sealed and folded paper. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 23 

After the election, in the following November, he opened 

the paper in the presence of his Cabinet, and these words 

were found written therein: — 

Executive Mansion, 
Washington, D. C, Aug. 23, 1864. 

This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that 
this administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co- 
operate with the President-elect as to save the Union between the election 
and the inauguration, as he will have secured his election on such ground that 
he cannot possibly save it afterward. 

A. Lincoln. 

Was there ever a nobler patriotism shown by any man 
than is contained in those few lines? What utter forget- 
fulness of self, what devotion to the country do they re- 
veal. Then, as at the beginning, we see him driving 
straight forward to his one mighty purpose, — the salvation 
of the Union. No criticism, no personal or party defeat, 
nothing could change that great intent. There, indeed, is 
a lesson to be learned and to be repeated from day to 
day. We none of us can be an Abraham Lincoln, but we 
all can try to follow in his footsteps. If we do so the 
country will rise to ever new heights, as he would fain 
have had it. 

That nation has not lived in vain which has given to 
the world Washington and Lincoln, the best great men and 
the greatest good men whom history can show. But if we 



24 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



content ourselves with eulogy and neglect the teaching of 
their lives we are unworthy of the heritage they have left 
us. To us they offer lofty ideals to which we may not, 
perhaps cannot, attain, but it is only by aiming at ideals 
which are never reached that the great victories on earth 
are won. Yet when all is said it is not Lincoln's patient 
wisdom, his undaunted courage, his large abilities that 
should really sink deepest into our hearts and minds to- 
day. Touch, if you can, as he touched, the "mystic 
chords of memory." Think of that noble character, that 
unwearied devotion to his country, that gentle heart which 
went out in sympathy to all his people. No one can re- 
call all this and not feel that he is lifted up and made 
better. Remember him as he lay dying, having offered up 
the last great sacrifice on the altar of his country. Then, 
indeed, you feel his greatness, and you cry out, in the 
words of Bunyan: — 

So Valiant-for-Truth passed over and all the trumpets sounded for him on 
the other side. 



FEB 2 1914 



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